Religion and Philosophy.—In fact, for Hegel as for all rationalists whose attitude is also religious, religion and philosophy were two forms of the same thing. Religion contains philosophic truths under the form of imagination: philosophy contains religious truth under the form of reason. The difference is one of form only, not of content. This had not been the view of Rousseau, nor is it the deepest view; and it was not the view of a thinker of the Romantic school who did more than any individual among his predecessors to bring the religious problem to the point where it now stands.
Schleiermacher.—While the sun of Romanticism was at its zenith, the spirit of Kant's critical philosophy was kept alive by a thinker of as deep spiritual and intellectual insight as Hegel himself.
Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) brought the religious problem down from those altitudes to which Romanticist metaphysics had raised it, to what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." He approached religion from the side of inner experience, the point of view of psychology. The profound insight of Kant had already shown that this was the direction on which future thought would travel, by tracing back the religious problem to a personal need more clearly and penetratingly than ever before—a need set up by the incongruity of the real and the ideal.
His View of Religious Ideas.—Just as Rousseau, owing to his own religious experience, was in a better position to attack the religious problem than the philosophers of the "enlightenment," so Schleiermacher had the advantage of some Romanticists. As a boy, he had been put to school with the Moravians, and throughout his own life he never ceased to declare that the years spent among them had been of vital importance to the development of his views. In 1801 he writes:
"My way of thinking has indeed no other foundation than my own peculiar character, my inborn mysticism, my education as it has been determined from within."
And his own experience of religion established in him the conviction that the innermost life of men must be lived in feeling, and that this alone can bring man into immediate relation to the highest. His acceptance of Kant's criticism of reason led him to understand that intellectual concepts, in the religious sphere, (i.e. dogmas) must always be of secondary importance: experience comes first. And his profound originality lies just here, and it is just here that Schleiermacher stands out as the forerunner of the modern view. He it was who first made it evident that religious ideas derive their validity from that inner experience which they are an attempt to describe. If a dogma is an expression of an experience felt by man in his innermost life, it is a valid dogma, even if philosophic criticism hesitates to sanction it.[31]
What Is Religion?—The distance of this position from that of the eighteenth century intellectualism which regarded religion either as a form of philosophy or of superstition, is obvious. Schleiermacher attacks two intellectualist prejudices in particular: (1) That according to which religion is conceived of primarily as a doctrine (either revealed, or grounded on reason), and (2) That which regards religion as merely a means towards morality.
Religion, according to Schleiermacher, has an existence independent of (though, no doubt, associated with) philosophy, superstition, or morality. Its essence consists neither in speculation nor in action, but in a certain type of feeling, of inner experience. Schleiermacher characterised this particular type of feeling as a feeling of dependence: the immediate consciousness that everything finite exists in and through the infinite, everything temporal in and through the eternal.
That Schleiermacher should have described the specifically religious feeling in this particular way is comparatively irrelevant so far as our present purpose is concerned. The point of importance is that he was the first to recognise the independence of religion, to see in it a legitimate and natural form of human activity, which exists, not for the sake of knowledge or of morality, but for its own sake, and on its own account.
Here, though Hegel took a different view, Schleiermacher is one in spirit with the Romantic school; indeed, he may be said to have drawn the logical conclusions of Romanticism. The independence and originality of religion is the necessary consequence of a philosophy which set itself against the unbalanced intellectualism of the "enlightenment."